Opposite Ending
by With Death Comes More Death
Summary: Tragedies rarely have happy endings. Romantic-comedies rarely have tragic endings. So how exactly would a tragic romantic-comedy end?


Hey guys, my name is With Death Comes More Death and I proudly present to you all the first chapter of a story that I once again didn't name until after this story was written… Man, I need a new opening joke.

Well, unfunny ongoing jokes aside, I want to welcome to you all to this little side project of mine. This is a project that took me somewhere along the lines of five months to finish and I'm happy to say that I'm finally finished with it.

Now those of you who are familiar with my previous works, well to be more accurate my previous _work_ , on this site might be asking yourself how it's possible this chapter took me five months to finish when I just pumped out a chapter that went past the fourteen-thousand word mark in about two months of work.

The answer to that question is actually quite simple. I was so focused on working on those updates that I never got around to finishing what I started with this story, but now I did, so here it is.

Alright, now to explain why I wrote this story to begin with.

*Claps hands together and breathes in deeply*

So I'm a fan of Tokyo Ghoul and I'm a fan of OreGairu, and I wanted to write a story that crossed those universes together. Mainly because I found that the two main protagonists of both series have a lot in common.

Think about it.

Both Hikigaya and Kaneki's problems stem from them being alone. They both start off with black hair and grey eyes. They're both bookworms. They're both kind individuals.

I mean, take out Hachiman's cynical personality and dead fish eyes and they're essentially the same person. Of course, they do differ in some aspects of their lives (e.g: Kaneki's experiences made him not want to be alone, while Hikigaya's made him push people away), but their groundworks are somewhat the same.

This made me ask myself: "what would Hachiman Hikigaya be like if he was a ghoul", and this is the result. A result that I hope you enjoy, by the way.

So without much further ado, let's start this mother up… You know after this mandatory disclaimer.

 **-Mandatory Disclaimer-**

I don't own either OreGairu or Tokyo Ghoul.

 **-Chapter 1: World Weary-**

If someone were to ask me what my opinion was on the world around me, I probably would've gave that person an explanation that was so bitter and cynical that it would either make that person break out in tears or make them lose all their faith in everything around them just by listening to it.

That, or ignore what I had said completely and go on living their lives, almost as if I had said nothing to them at all.

And if I were to have to bet money on which one was more likely to happen, I would've had to bet my money on the latter.

But then again, who exactly asks someone what their opinion on the world was nowadays, anyway?

Something like that was better off reserved for an alcohol/drug-fueled night out with a friend when you're just saying the stuff that's on your mind at the moment because you're too drunk/high to really care about finding something more socially-acceptable to talk about.

Though, it's not like I know what that's like to begin with anyway.

However, that does bring back memories of a certain buxom red-head I know and the night that I walked into her bar looking for information just to find her completely and utterly wasted.

The memories of what happened that night still makes my face turn bright red.

Also, while I'm on the topic, why do we refer to the state of someone being drunk as wasted anyway?

Do we refer to all of the brain cells that are killed off every time someone consumes an ounce of alcohol, thus wasting them before they were able to reach their full potential, or maybe we're referring to the wasted potential of the person consuming it?

I don't know, but I do know that I never want to know after what happened with that red-head.

No seriously, thank every deity in existence that she was too drunk to remember what happened that night because she'd hold that over my head until the day I die and the last thing I need in my life is that woman having blackmail material on me.

Wait, that's not true at all, it would be more accurate if I said: "...the last thing I need in my life is that woman having _even more_ blackmail material on me."

Yeah, that's definitely more accurate. I swear, that woman has information on almost everybody in the world. I know that it sounded like a bit of an over-exaggeration, well it actually was an over-exaggeration, but that's seriously what it felt most of the time.

Wait, aren't I starting to get a little off-track here?

What I was thinking about earlier…?

Something about what my opinion on the world around me was…

Eh, whatever.

If I managed to forget about it so quickly, it couldn't have been too important, right?

Yeah, there's no possible way I would be able to forget about something if it was actually important to me, but then again I lose my train of thought every time I start thinking about that night, so maybe it really was something important after all.

"Ah!"

The sound of someone letting out a loud, piercing shriek pulled me out of my thoughts the moment it hit my ears. And when I came back to reality, I found myself standing on the non-descript rooftop of a non-descript building looking down into a dirty alleyway that, incidentally, was also rather non-descript.

I could see everything inside of the alleyway from where I stood, despite the fact that it was nearly completely shrouded by the shadows of the buildings that made it up, and as I looked down into it, I was able to notice a rather unsavory scene playing out directly in the middle of it.

There was a teenage girl, probably no older than myself, backing away from a fedora-wearing man clad in a dark-brown trench coat, which did as trenchcoats did and reached down so far that it was almost to his ankles.

I couldn't see the girl's face from where I stood, actually the only thing I could see was the top of her head, which was adorned with short hair in a color that I wasn't able to make out because of the shadows that blanketed her and was also tied up into a messy bun on the right side of her head, but I didn't need to see her face to know that she was completely and utterly terrified of the man stalking towards her slowly.

The fact that her entire body was trembling as she backed away from her pursuer was more than enough evidence to prove that point.

I could feel my lips form a slight grimace as I watched the scene unfold because I already knew what that man had planned for that girl and it definitely wasn't going to be pretty.

' _What the hell is she doing out in a place like this?'_ I ask myself as I let out an irritated sigh, silently wondering what would've possessed a girl like her to go down such a seedy-looking alleyway at this time at night.

Damn did her presence complicate things.

I had just spent the last couple of hours waiting for that trenchcoat-clad man to appear, but I hadn't expected him to show up with someone with him, or more specifically, someone that was still alive.

It was common knowledge for people like myself that he liked to stalk this one particular alleyway because of the steady flow of work/school weary people that pass by it everyday due to it being located so close to a monorail station, which made it one of the prime locations in the Chiba Prefecture to hunt, but there was one major problem with that fact.

He shouldn't have been hunting here to begin with.

This particular alleyway wasn't a part of the feeding ground that had been assigned to him and from what I've heard, this wasn't the first time he's hunted in this location.

The rule was extremely simple: 'never hunt in locations not a part of your designated feeding ground.'

The fact that this guy managed to break that rule not once, not twice, but three times prior to this current incident meant that he had no intention of following that rule and that, incidentally, leads to why I was standing here on top of this rooftop.

I was supposed to warn him that if he broke the rule one more time that serious action would be taken against him, but since it looks like I'm too late for that, I'm going to have to take action now.

And now I have the added pressure of having to decide whether or not I'm going to save that girl, who I am going to save by the way, I just wanted to make sure that there wasn't an overly elaborate ambush waiting for me when I got down there.

Great. Just great.

She's lucky that I have a twisted sense of morality that makes me want to go save her even though I do the exact same thing the guy trying to kill her does every month or so, because if not, I would've totally let her die so I could get the upper hand on the bastard.

Knowing that it would be counter-productive to allow her to see my face while doing what I was about to do, which was for all extensive purposes, a crime; I reached up and slipped the wooden half-mask that was hanging around my neck over the lower portion of my face before I stepped off of the rooftop I was currently standing on and started plummeting towards the ground below.

The sound I made while landing resonated throughout the alleyway and immediately caught the attention of its two sole occupants.

The trenchcoat-clad man, or trenchcoat-kun as I've now dubbed him, turned around to face me and shot me a glare that probably would've caused most people's hearts to stop from sheer terror, but did little to faze me.

"Who the hell are you supposed to be?"

Wait, wasn't that the question I was supposed to be asking you?

Eh, whatever.

"I'm no one really."

That was the answer I chose to go with.

It was a terribly cliche thing to say, but I really could've cared less about being original since I'm doing it in front of two people I'm probably never going to see ever again after tonight.

"Just someone who wants to get what's about to happen over and done with as soon as possible."

I added, hoping that it sounded cool.

It felt pretty cool when it came out of my mouth, but something like that was subjective so I really wouldn't be able to tell until someone else tells me, which was probably unlikely given the situation.

So I'm just going to assume that it sounded cool and move on to more important things, like the guy currently giving me a death glare.

"Oh, you're trying to steal my meal, eh?" asked trenchcoat-kun as he took a step in my direction, probably in an attempt to intimidate me as he added, "Well, that's not-"

"Can we please just skip all of the pre-fight banter?" I groaned, massaging the bridge of my nose out of frustration, "I mean, what of 'wants to get what's about to happen over and done with as soon as possible', do you not understand?"

Normally, I would've kept quiet and let the guy talk, but I seriously did not have the energy to listen to this guy's prattle.

Today was _supposed_ to be my day off and the last thing I wanted to do was waste time listening to some guy say something that was probably going to be along the lines of: "That's not going to happen" or "Try and take it from me".

Like I said, I just wanted to get this over and done with so I can go back home and enjoy the rest of my day off doing what I was supposed to do, and that was nothing at all.

"Tch, fucking punk," the trenchcoat-clad man growled right before he started sprinting towards me.

He attempted to hit me with a left hook as he drew near, which prompted me to lean back so I would avoid getting hit by it.

Trenchcoat-kun didn't stop with that one attempt at permanently maiming me and kept swinging his arms wildly in my general direction, probably hoping that at least one of them would connect.

But of course, none of them actually did.

"Who…"

Lean to the right and another missed swing.

"...the hell…"

Lean to the left and yet another missed swing.

"...do you…"

Okay, he tried a kick that time, so I can't say he's not trying to be original with his attacks.

He still didn't manage to hit me, though because I took a step back right when he initiated the kick.

"...think you are!"

Wait, didn't he already ask me that question?

' _I take back what I said about you being original!'_ I shout to myself mentally as I lean out of the way of yet another poorly-executed punch and slam my knee right into his newly-exposed stomach, ' _Seriously, the nerve of some people these days, if you're going to be unoriginal then be unoriginal throughout, god dammit!'_

"F-fucker!" Trenchcoat-kun spat out hoarsely as I removed my knee from his stomach.

Damn, even his post-injury insults were terribly cliche.

Hell, this entire situation was starting to remind me of some teenage writer's poorly-executed attempt to establish how strong his main protagonist is by having him easily take down some shady neerdowell who will never factor into the story at any point afterwards. **[1]**

I mean, all of the pieces fit.

The fact that I was fighting a man with no distinctive qualities except for his choice of clothing, in a dirty alleyway with no one around it to witness the events that were going to transpire despite the fact we were in a city with a population of close to a million people, after I found him harassing a girl who looked right around my age was testament to that.

No seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if I somehow managed to run into this girl again at some much more mundane point in time so she could become my love interest or something.

It was a good thing that this is real life and not some sort of teenager's story because the chances of something like that happening in real life were close to none, because despite what my little sister says about the subject, the last thing something like myself needed in my life was a love interest.

Although, I wouldn't be totally opposed to the idea if it actually did manage to happen. I just feel that it wouldn't be very advantageous for anyone involved.

One of the best pieces of evidence to support this opinion of mine would be the object that was currently extending out from the lowest portion of my back.

To put it bluntly, it was a weapon.

It was a weapon that was made out of the substance that ran throughout the entirety of my blood system and could be controlled like it was an extra limb, but it was a weapon nonetheless.

The proper and most widely accepted name for this weapon would be: kagune.

In terms of function, a kagune worked a lot like the claws or jaws of a predatory animal, which basically meant that they made fighting and hunting easier for people like myself.

A kagune could come in many shapes and sizes.

Well actually, someone could only have one of four specific types of kagune: ukaku, koukaku, rinkaku, and bikaku; though most of them differed in shape, size, and appearance from one another in their specific categories.

And by the way, I have heard stories of people who had the ability to use more than one kind of kagune at a time, but the few rumors I have heard made them out to be really rare occurrences, so I'm just going to factor them out as outliers for the time being and move on.

The type of kagune that was currently coming out of my back, and was undoubtedly the best of the four categories someone could get, was a bikaku-type.

If someone were to ask why I thought that certain kind was the best, which by the way, was a question I got asked more than most people would think. I would always give the answer of: "it's the only one of the four to be completely and utterly average at everything."

Most of the time, this answer only served to confuse people more than the actual statement that made them ask the question in the first place, which was mainly because people couldn't see the value in the term "average".

Average, by definition, was something mediocre and not very good. That, of course, didn't sound very appealing to most people.

No, most people wanted something with better than average qualities, something better than the rest.

But what most people fail to see is that something that isn't necessarily exceptional at anything, also meant that it wasn't terrible at any particular field either.

Everything that was average always sat right in the middle and if everything about something was average, then that meant that people who were born with the bikaku kagune type could essentially do everything proficiently.

The other kagune types had their own strengths and weaknesses, of course.

The people who were born with ukaku-types were usually extremely fast, making them hard targets to hit, and they also had the ability to shoot projectile weapons out of their kagunes, making them extremely hard to get close to; but they did, however, run out of stamina much faster than the other kagune types and were all usually lacking in close-combat situations since they never really got into them to begin with.

The koukaku-type users usually had the advantage in terms of in-close combat and defense because they could contort their kagunes to create weapons, shields, and armor much easier than the others; however, those weapons were usually so heavy and bulky that they made moving around agilely difficult for the person using them.

And the rinkaku-types were just better at everything that had to deal with offense because their kagunes were built in a way that gave them the ability to brute force past most defenses, but unfortunately the structure of their kagunes made them extremely easy to break through, which made them really terrible at anything defensive, though that was easily offsetted by their superior regeneration abilities.

Also fun fact for those not in the know, despite the fact that most of this information was available to the public through a quick Google search; the material that people used to create their kagunes could also repair wounds the user happened to take during battle, even wounds that could be considered fatal to people who didn't have kagunes, which was yet another thing that made us stronger than normal people.

For example, say that someone managed to impale a kagune-user several times in the stomach.

The wound, that would've killed a normal human being, would be completely healed in a matter of hours, or even minutes depending on what class of kagune they had and as I already stated, the undisputed champion of regeneration were the rinkaku-types.

Bikaku-types, on the other hand, didn't have any of those advantages or disadvantages. You could say that we were forever stuck in the limbo that lay in between good and bad when it came to our combat abilities.

But we did, however, have one advantage over the other three classes and that was our versatility.

As I stated earlier, bikaku-types were average at pretty much everything having to do with combat, which was just another way of saying that we were proficient at everything.

If you also factor in the fact that list of strengths and weaknesses I just listed was now public knowledge thanks to the internet and an ever-growing awareness of our kind, my argument only made more sense.

Because when someone already knew about the basic capabilities of your only weapon, it made you a much easier opponent to fight since they could just actively avoid what it was naturally good at and target what it was naturally bad at.

But when your weapon was proficient at almost everything, it made you a much harder opponent to fight because you can't target a weakness that essentially never existed to begin with.

To get the upper hand on something like that, you had to be so skilled with your own kagune that it compensated for the areas it naturally lacked in.

Which was a rather rare quality to have in general because a kagune was just like any other weapon, it took a lot of time and practice to gain some semblance of mastery of it and plus, that advantage would be pretty much nullified if the bikaku-user was just as skilled or even more skilled than you were.

' _So in short...'_ I began mentally, ' _...bikaku-type kagunes are the best kagunes.'_

After I thought that final thought, I turned my attention back onto the trenchcoat-clad man that was currently hunched over in pain and felt a small pang of disgust run throughout the entirety of my body when my eyes fell onto him once again.

I let out a tired sigh and shifted my eyes down towards the crimson-red, tail-like predatory organ that was now sticking out of the lowest portion of my back. I think it was called the tailbone, I'm not really sure.

Knowing what I had to do next, I reared said organ back and pointed its tip right where I kneed trenchcoat-kun in the stomach.

"You know…" I begin to say, right before I plunged my kagune into and clean through trenchcoat-kun's stomach, causing a large amount of blood to erupt from the newly made hole in his back as I lifted him up in the air, "...I really hate people like you."

"Fu-" Trenchcoat-kun began to say before I flung him off of my kagune and towards a nearby wall, causing a loud and painful-sounding cracking noise to ring through the air as he slammed into said wall.

I really did hate people like him. People who outright defied the people trying to the help them, that is.

This particular ward was far different from the others and that was because of the designated feeding grounds set by the group of kagune-users in charge of the ward.

Being a part of the group myself, I knew that the reasoning behind the set feeding grounds was because we didn't want to draw too much attention towards the ward we lived in. We knew that the designated feeding grounds would limit the overall amount of prey someone could get and that would in turn diminish the amount of attention this ward got.

The amount of attention this ward got would greatly influence how easily we lived our lives. The more we received, the more protocol that restricted our everyday lives would be put in place.

So you could say that the rules my group set in place were there to keep the lives of people like us as easy as possible, but unfortunately, that message didn't always get through to everyone of us who decided to make this ward their home and simply did as they pleased.

Of course, we couldn't allow that sort of wild behaviour to go on without punishment and so we punished anyone who thought that the rules didn't apply to them.

The first offense usually warranted a face-to-face warning from one of our members, I say usually because it really depended on what rule the offender broke and the amount of times they broke that rule before we caught wind of it.

Most of the time, the offender would get the message and stop breaking that rule because of the fact that our group was known to be made up of some of the strongest kagune-users in the ward, and even the city.

I wouldn't know how we would stack up against some of the stronger ghouls in bigger cities like Tokyo, because I've never been out of the Chiba Prefecture for more than a couple of days at a time, which wasn't nearly enough time to gain an accurate gauge on the overall strength of the city's kagune-users.

But since we weren't based in a city like Tokyo, that really didn't matter, now did it?

What did matter was the fact that we were strong enough to force every kagune-user underneath the heel of our metaphorical boot, if we so wanted to. It sure as hell would've been easier than having to constantly deal with reckless kagune-users like trenchcoat-kun day in and day out, but that just wasn't how we worked.

No, instead we tried to keep the peace by introducing a set of rules and policies that were meant to give every kagune-user living in the ward a chance to live a relatively normal life.

So like I said earlier, we were just trying to make the lives of every kagune-user in the ward as easy as possible and that lead back to why I hated people like trenchcoat-kun. I mean, we even had a system that helped non-violent kagune-users get food without them having to kill anything.

We were just trying to help and don't get me wrong, I could understand why some people didn't want our help. Kagune-users were often forced to learn to rely on themselves from an extremely early age and having someone suddenly force rules upon you, even if they were meant to help you, felt like they were taking away part of your already limited freedom.

Hell, I felt the exact same way when I first came to this ward, but being the gentleman I was, I followed the rules that were given to me before the day I was finally offered a spot inside of their group.

Yeah, it was for that reason and totally not because of a certain pair of blue-haired siblings that called me creepy and threatened to kill me if they ever found me breaking the rules. Yeah, totally...

Well anyways, what I'm trying to get at was that it was completely fine if someone didn't want our help.

All we asked was that people follow our rules if they were going to live in the ward and if they did that, the kagune-users who didn't want our help would never have to hear from us again.

We could understand if they somehow managed to break a rule once or twice, and maybe even three times given the circumstances, but for someone to break a rule several times in a span of less than a couple weeks was a clear indication that kagune-user had no intention of following our rules, no matter who it affected.

If there was some unknown circumstance that forced them to break those rules then they could've easily came to us, drawn our attention to it, and we would've tried to solve that problem for them if we could.

And they couldn't say that they just wanted to do it on their own because if it was a big enough problem, they should've been desperate enough to throw away their pride and come to us because they already knew what the alternative was. That, or we would've eventually found out about it ourselves, so there was no excuse to not say something to us if something was forcing you to break rules.

And that's why I hated people like him, they dragged everyone around them down for no reason other than just because they wanted to.

' _Seriously, I don't care if you want to run yourself into an iceberg, but if you're going to sink than sink on your own dammit!'_ **[2]**

I curse that to myself silently right before I started walking over towards trenchcoat-kun, who was lying on his side with his back slumped against the now blood-covered wall I threw him against.

Knowing that he probably wasn't going to be getting up anytime soon, I decided to conserve some energy and take my time with walking over to him, which allowed me the opportunity to take note of something that I probably would've missed if I had rushed in.

His eyes were trained on something in his hand, something white and thin.

I let out a sigh at the sight of it.

' _Please don't let this be something that'll make me want to feel guilty about what I'm going to do...'_ I say to myself, even though I'm already fairly sure that it is something of that nature, ' _Serious, why can't things ever be simple?'_

Having done this sort of thing many times before in the past, I had run into many similar scenarios where the person I was about to kill had some sort of sad backstory that explained their actions up until the point of contact, thus making me feel guilty about my own.

Or, at the very least, that's what should've happened.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't saying that I didn't feel guilty about doing those sort of things to people. I've just felt that way so many times that it started to affect me less and less before it finally reached a point where it barely affected me at all.

I think the proper word for something like that was desensitization.

And according to Google-sensei, there were three proper dictionary definitions to the word desensitize, the most fitting of which being: 'to make (someone) less likely to feel shock or distress at scenes of cruelty, violence, or suffering by overexposure to such images'.

Memories of a much younger, much more emotionally sensitive version of myself flashed through my head as I neared trenchcoat-kun, who was still staring at the object in his hand with longing turquoise eyes, seemingly completely oblivious to my approaching presence.

The memories had caused a surge of emotions to run through my body, all of which pleading that I stop what I was doing and try to find a better way to deal with this situation, but I shrugged them off as quickly as they came.

' _Feeling sympathetic for the person you're hurting isn't going to help anyone, especially not them,'_ I remind myself as I finally reach the spot where trenchcoat-kun was lying, ' _You've already gone too far to turn back now, so hurry up and finish what you started.'_

Being spurred on by my own selfish attempts to justify my actions, I point the tip of my kagune right at trenchcoat-kun's head, which made him shift his attention off of the object in his hand and onto me almost immediately. He stared at me for a second or two before letting out an amused snort through his nostrils that put my instincts on edge.

"Hey punk, you're… you're one of _them_ right? The group that runs this ward, you're one of them, right?"

The suddenness of the question caught me off-guard, so off-guard that I gave a brief nod in response before I realized what I was doing.

"Then could… could you do me a favor and take care of the people in this picture?" he asked as he lifted, or rather, struggled to lift the arm that held said picture up to a level where I could see it clearly, revealing that it displayed a group of four people that I assumed to be family due to the fact they all held a striking resemblance with one another.

There was one adult and three children. The one adult being a middle-aged woman with long silver-hair standing right in the middle of a group of children. The group of children being made out of one girl with similar-colored hair that was tied up into a ponytail, one boy with short dark gray hair, and a baby whose gender was indiscernible due to the fact that it was wrapped up in blankets.

They were all looking at the camera with wide, rehearsed-looking smiles.

My lips formed a slight frown underneath my half-mask when I realized that I recognized one of the people in the photo as a girl who took part in the program that the group I was with offered, you know the one where we gave food to kagune-users who didn't want to kill their own meals.

She and I haven't spoken to each other much, so I really didn't know much about her other than what she looked like, but there was no doubt in my mind that the girl in the picture was her.

"How do you know these people?" I asked him as I snatched the photo from the man's hand, my tone dripping with suspicion as I did so, "And what exactly do you mean by 'take care of them'?"

Trenchcoat-kun let out a mirthless chuckle as his arm sank back to the ground and replied with, "Don't worry… it's not what you think. They're… they're my family."

"Who… who do you think was holding the camera, eh?" he joked dryly before he started violently coughing.

' _That doesn't make any sense,'_ I think to myself as my eyes bounce from trenchcoat-kun and the photo that he claimed to depict his family, ' _Why would he need to hunt if his family already gets food from us? Unless...'_

"Of course…" I mutter under my breath as I let out yet another exasperated sigh, "... of course, that's what happened."

It was an all too common happening in the world of kagune-users. Parents leaving their children to fend for themselves, that is.

I've seen it happen to families time and time again over the past couple of years.

In a perfect world, a parent would only consider leaving their child either because they were forced to, because they knew staying would get them into trouble, or because they felt that their presence would only do more damage than good.

But unfortunately, the world I lived in wasn't a perfect one. No, it wasn't even close, source: me.

More often than not, especially in the kagune-user community, parents left their children because they thought of them as burdens and casted them aside because their own survival or happiness meant more to them than anything else.

Trenchcoat-kun was just lucky that I didn't think that he belonged to the majority because if I did, he wouldn't have lived long enough for me to hear my answer to his request.

"Who the hell do you think we are?" I ask him in a tone that was dripping with annoyance, "We don't run a charity organization and besides, you and I both know that if you really wanted to protect your family, you wouldn't have gone and done something as stupid as this."

I had expected him to retort or curse at me, but instead, trenchcoat-kun let out a bitter chuckle and replied with, "Y-yeah, I guess… I guess you're right."

' _Good, you understand, that makes what's about to happen a whole lot easier,'_ I think to myself as I rear back my kagune in preparation to ram it clean through his skull, all the while being genuinely surprised by the man's acceptance of the matter.

I was half-tempted to say that I would try and look out for his family as to ease whatever worries he had before his death, but I didn't, knowing that it wouldn't do anything for anyone after everything was said and done.

It was clear to me that he regretted whatever decisions he had made to get himself into this position and that probably meant that he had already accepted that he had done his family wrong, and that would probably weigh on his mind no matter what I said.

And I'm not someone who likes to commit such self-gratifying actions, so I would probably find little to no relief in those words anyways.

' _How unfair...'_ I think to myself as a bitter smile formed under my mask, ' _... the only thing I can do to make myself feel better about what I'm about to do is something that would make me hate myself if I did it.'_

The world was unfair like that and truth be told, that's one of the reasons why I hated it so much.

So without saying another word, I plunged my kagune right into the center of trenchcoat-kun's forehead, using enough force that it went clean through his head and still managed to easily penetrate the wall behind it, causing whatever life he still held in his body to leave almost instantly.

As I slide my kagune out of the hole I made in his skull, I glance down at the picture that I had taken from trenchcoat-kun and shove it into one of my pockets, making a mental note to report what had just happened to the people in the photo at some point in the future, before turning my attention onto to the sole witness of my most latest necessary act of violence.

Unlike from up on my previous position on the rooftops, I could actually make out some of the girl's more prominent features from this elevation and from what I could see, she looked like the very epitome of the phrase: 'youth-loving youth', a phrase that I had coined to describe people who have either decided to fully embrace the lie that is our youth or haven't seen enough of how the real world worked to know just how much of a lie it really was.

I, like a lot of kagune-users my age, had freed myself from that shroud a long time ago because we didn't have a lot of the luxuries that regular people had.

Why? Because regular people believed kagune-users to be so dangerous that they formed a full-blown, government-supported organization that had the sole objective of wiping my kind out.

It didn't matter if the you were young or old, violent or pacifistic. It didn't even matter if you were a child. If you were found to be a kagune-user then you were deemed to be a threat to society and had to be killed immediately.

There were no arrests, no trials, and definitely no mercy.

It was a system that I deemed to be terribly unfair and one of the main reasons why my opinion of the world was so poor, but there was something about the entire situation that I deemed to be even more unfair and it was the fact that I could understand the reasoning as to why they feared my kind so much.

In terms of appearances, we didn't differ too much from our human-counterparts, so the bias against wasn't because we looked different.

Actually, the only real way to tell the difference would be to either have the kagune-user reveal themselves as one or to put them go through a series of tests to see if they matched any of the characteristics that only kagune-users had.

For example, kagune-users couldn't eat or drink a lot of the things that people normally ate or drank, with the exception of regular water and coffee. If we tried to consume anything other than those two things, it would taste so awful that it took a good amount of willpower to not puke whatever it was out immediately and even if someone were able to stomach the horrid taste and swallow the food, it would cause us a good amount of internal damage and cause our overall physical condition to worsen.

So often times, people who suspected someone to be a kagune-user would force human food into that person's mouths so quickly that they would have very little time to prepare themselves for the taste, which understandably made them cough said food out almost immediately.

What we could eat however, was one of the main reasons as to why we were so feared by regular people. To put it bluntly, the only solid substance we could eat without it tasting absolutely terrible was the flesh of human beings and other kagune-users. The latter of which being a rather uncommon occurrence with most kagune-users because the flesh of our own kind also tasted horrible, but unlike human food, we could actually swallow it without causing internal damage to ourselves.

Fresh human flesh on the other hand, tasted absolutely amazing. If I had to describe the taste to a human, I would have to say that it tasted sweet because it tasted nothing like the only thing I had to compare it to, which was coffee and regular people considered that to taste bitter so I had to assume that the taste was sweet.

So when the only appetizing food choice that we had was another sentient species, it could only take a really short-sighted person to not be able to connect the dots and realize why regular people feared us kagune-users like they did.

They slaughtered my kind for survival's sake and that was something I could understand since technically we were doing the exact same thing.

But like I said earlier, just because I could understand their reasoning behind wanting to wipe my kind out, didn't mean that I thought it was fair.

I could understand them wanting to survive as a species, but that didn't give them the right to slaughter us and feed the public lies that said we were nothing more than bloodthirsty monsters who couldn't care less about who they killed.

That would only cause more kagune-users to turn towards the path of violence that would eventually turn them into the monsters they claimed we were.

But then again, who am I to complain when I don't even know where to start fixing these problems and besides, who would even bother listening to a pessimist like me?

' _Crap, I started monologuing again, didn't I?'_ I think to myself tiredly, ' _I really need to stop getting so into them in public.'_

As I refocused my attention back onto the clearly terrified teenage girl before me, I noticed that she was no longer standing and was sitting down onto the ground, which made me assume that she had somehow fallen over at some point while I was dealing with trenchcoat-kun.

' _Why couldn't have you just ran away while I was dealing with trenchcoat-kun?'_ I ask her mentally as I subconsciously began to walk over to where she sitting.

Upon seeing that I was beginning to make my towards her, the teenage girl tried to force herself up to her feet probably in an attempt to flee, but I noticed that her legs looked really unsteady as she rose and they gave way under the moment she tried run away in the other direction, causing her to fall right back onto the ground.

The only real difference from last time was that she fell directly on her chest, which I doubted hurt too much since she had a rather big pair of cushions positioned in the center of her chest to lessen the impact of her fall. Actually scratch that, I wasn't quite sure since I've heard that for a woman, getting hit in the breast is a lot like getting hit in the balls for a man, so I really didn't know if she was hurt or not.

My inner ramblings about breasts aside, I continued to walk towards her as she rolled back onto her back to face me, which revealed to me an expression of absolute terror.

I opened my mouth to speak, hoping that I could say something to calm her down, but the sound of the girl letting out a loud squeak cut me off before any words could come out of my mouth, "G-ghoul!"

' _Ghoul, huh?'_ I repeat the word to myself mentally as I stared down at her cowering form.

That was the name the humans had given to kagune-users and I had a rather bittersweet opinion about it.

By definition, the term 'ghoul' had a rather negative connotation associated with it. Literally, it was used to describe an evil spirit or phantom that robbed graves and ate dead bodies. So technically speaking, calling us ghouls was basically a direct message from the human race that said: 'we think you're nothing more than bloodthirsty monsters who eat people, go die'.

On the other hand, I did have to admit that it was a pretty accurate name considering that ghouls do in fact eat the bodies of the dead, so at the very least it wasn't misleading people as to what made us different to human beings, though most of us don't necessarily have the time or the resources to go grave robbing anymore.

Like I said earlier, the name was supposed to have a negative connotation behind it. It was a word to describe a race of monsters and most people agreed with that distinction, after all.

So, when the girl called me a ghoul, she was really just calling me a monster.

Her words didn't hurt me very much since I have been called all sorts of names over the years, none of which were very flattering by the way, but it did remind me that her opinion about ghouls was the same one that most people had nowadays.

She thought me to be a monster who was going to kill her and eat the meat off her bones when, in all actuality, the only thing I was going to do was help her get up off the ground. I had hoped that doing so would improve her opinion on ghouls, but hearing her speak with so much terror in her voice reminded me that I had no business trying to do such a thing.

Because in the end, she had every right to be afraid of me and the race of creatures I belonged to.

And truth be told, she and the entirety of the human race was probably better off being afraid of us since we did eat people and not every ghoul acted as peacefully as I did towards them. Which meant that until another adequate food source for ghouls popped up, something that I highly doubted would appear any time soon, it would be best to keep the humans afraid of us.

So instead of kneeling down and offering her one of my gloved hands like I had planned, I turn on a heel and start walking towards trenchcoat-kun's corpse so I can start the process of properly disposing of his body, which was something that all members of the group I belonged to had to do whenever we had to kill another ghoul.

We disposed of the bodies because if the proper authorities actually managed to get their hands onto them, they would undoubtedly be able to find a way to trace them back to anyone connected with the dead ghoul they found, which would cause the authorities to implement more actions to flush those people out and that would of course make our lives harder. The reasoning was simple as that.

So without uttering a single word, I make my way back over to trenchcoat-kun's limp corpse, kneel down next to it and drape it over my shoulders fireman style, grunting loudly as I force myself to stand up straight again.

Still a little curious about how the girl was reacting to the entire situation, I send a fleeting glance her way and find that she still hadn't moved an inch from where she sat.

Seriously, what the hell is this girl thinking?

I take a step towards her and she flinches in fear, but the moment I turn my back to her, she doesn't even try to run away?

Does she want me to kill her or something?

In response to her stupidity, an exasperated sigh escapes from my lips and I mutter to myself, "What an idiot…"

Not wanting to spend another moment standing in this dirty alleyway, I once again release my kagune and jump up towards the wall I had thrown trenchcoat-kun into, stabbing said predatory organ into the wall like it was an ice pick.

My goal being the rooftop I was standing on just a few minutes ago, I repeat this action over and over again as I bounce between the walls of the alleyway, which doesn't take more than a couple seconds due to the vast amount of experience I had doing just this.

' _Alright, now all I have to do is get rid of trenchcoat-kun here and I get to enjoy the rest of my day off,'_ I think to myself as I reach my desired destination, ' _Then again, Touka-chan is probably pissed that I left without telling her again and knowing her, she's probably waiting by the front door waiting to give me a piece of her mind.'_

' _Well, might as well get this over with…'_ I think to myself as I begin making my way back to the place I call home, a little coffee shop named 'Anteiku'.

 **-Chapter End: References-**

 **[1]** : This is a joke that's aimed at myself and myself alone, so don't you dare think I'm calling anyone out. You and I both know that I'm too much of a coward to do something that stupid.

 **[2]** : Reference to the Titanic, a ship that was hit by an iceberg and sunk, spawning a movie that tortured men throughout the entirety of the year 1999 and the early 2000's.

 **-Author's Notes-**

Well, that's a wrap folks. I hope you're not too mad that I didn't include Touka or any of the Anteiku ghouls in this chapter because I'm saving that for the chapter after this one.

Also, do any of you think I made Hikigaya OOC?

I'm not the best with doing cynical monologues while in first-person, which is strange to me because I think I do a pretty good job of writing those while I'm writing in the third person. I guess I'm just so used to writing in the third-person that it's hindered my ability to write from my own perspective.

Well anyways, I hoped you enjoyed. Give me any feedback you think appropriate and also don't expect frequent updates with this story.

It probably won't take me five months to finish the next chapter, but don't expect an update for a couple of months at the very least. Like I said earlier, I kind of sort of have to focus my time writing for that previous work I alluded to.

So that's about it, peace out you guys!


End file.
